Media Guardian reports on a service due for launch in Spring 2010 from British Telecom (BT) and Google, allowing Internet Service Providers to host and stream video from their own networks, rather than using the network which is increasingly over-burdened by high quality streaming from BBC iPlayer, 40D, Hulu and, of course, Google's own YouTube and video services:
BT Wholesale is working with BT Retail and two other ISPs – understood to be Orange and Virgin Media – as well as the BBC, Channel 4 and Five, on a network called Content Connect. The idea behind the service is to store popular video content on an ISP's network, rather than relying on the internet, which is becoming increasingly congested, for the delivery of online video.
A logical extension for those in education who can turn the vision into reality, is that schools and education authorities are or can be Internet Service Providers to their institutions. In the same way as Scotland national intranet, Glow, hosts content on a network of cache servers throughout Scottish schools, a Local Authority or small country could ramp up the potential for downloading and sharing high quality video 'online' by not going online at all. Use overnight downtime to download prime learning content overnight to a local area network, and then deliver it quickly at the point of need during the day.
Previously, only large-scale enterprise could envisage this way of borrowing content on the cheap to serve it later at faster speeds. As a service provided by a larger scale programme such as that proposed by BT and Google, the economies of scale they will earn let the rest of us enjoy fast video at a reasonably priced premium.
But, given that television was promised (wrongly) to be the saviour of learning in the 60s, how would you change things in your learning and your students' learning to take advantage of such an opportunity? Are classrooms full of plugged in kids, akin to the average open-plan office of iPod-entangled drones poking at Outlook, what we're after? Or would fast-streaming video be a significant enough innovation to change pedagogy, curriculum and school spaces beyond recognition?
Photo CC Kevin Steele
OK, so the headline lied. As we approach the annual crush to listify the world in terms of the top stories of the year, the top pop divas and even the top education bloggers, top Umberto Eco talks to Der Spiegel about the world's fascination with lists.
Lists are a particularly important part of living life as a Bebo Boomer, filling hours of social network use by their users. Lists are also the part of our online life that is most derided: a waste of time, a feckless use of time by feckless people. Yet, lists have always been crucial to our existence and way of organising thought and acting out our intentions.
In the interview, Eco refers to the most common list of all: the one Google churns out after a search, and phrases in an interesting and most simple of ways what media literacy is all about:
Eco: [...] Google makes a list, but the minute I look at my Google-generated list, it has already changed. These lists can be dangerous -- not for old people like me, who have acquired their knowledge in another way, but for young people, for whom Google is a tragedy. Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating.
SPIEGEL: Are you saying that teachers should instruct students on the difference between good and bad? If so, how should they do that?
Eco: Education should return to the way it was in the workshops of the Renaissance. There, the masters may not necessarily have been able to explain to their students why a painting was good in theoretical terms, but they did so in more practical ways. Look, this is what your finger can look like, and this is what it has to look like. Look, this is a good mixing of colors. The same approach should be used in school when dealing with the Internet. The teacher should say: "Choose any old subject, whether it be German history or the life of ants. Search 25 different Web pages and, by comparing them, try to figure out which one has good information." If 10 pages describe the same thing, it can be a sign that the information printed there is correct. But it can also be a sign that some sites merely copied the others' mistakes.
When "old people" (he said it) like Umberto Eco get it, I'm reassured. But when was the last time you saw a teacher in your school be quite as explicit, though, in how students should run a basic search?
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: Virtual graduation shortlisted for an edublog award! Please vote at http://bit.ly/8qDkKI
Coffee and #mscidel blogs - nice way to spend some time on a friday morning. #fb
#mscidel @Claraoshea I have just had a look at the cartoon. You are funny Clara. One can only wonder at which question this cartoon answers.
More photos from SL graduation http://bit.ly/7xW6gn #mscidel
edinburghmsc: via @jar: please vote for virtual graduation for an edublog award for 'best educational use of a virtual world'! http://bit.ly/8qDkKI
edinburghmsc: via @flittleton: just attended #altgame webinar event. The archive is at http://bit.ly/6s9y0F
edinburghmsc: via @flittleton: RT @JISC: : An online learning task force has been set up to help the UK HE sector maintain & extend.. http://bit.ly/6W6JRy
edinburghmsc: via @flittleton: I am in the wrong job!!! "Navy get PSPs" http://bit.ly/8AtvnN
How big can they get? What's the largest so far detected? Where does an 18 billion solar mass black hole hide? A SpaceRipTV original in collaboration with Space.com
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: The Internet as Playground and Factory conference, New York Nov 12-14 http://digitallabor.org/
This is great if you are a researcher and, I'd have thought, indispensable if you're a researcher in academia. Make sure your papers are included in this prediction engine of research papers, helping users find academic friends-of-a-friend and papers they might otherwise have missed. It also allows an academic or groups of academics to annotate the reports they find.
And when the time comes to collate your academic report or paper, Mendeley will export to Word or OpenOffice the bibliography you used, in the right format. Are you on Mendeley.com? Should be.
Spoke with IBM Master Inventor Andy Stanford-Clark. See him talk about space and time to innovate, 90/10 rule! http://bit.ly/6NRGme #mscidel
Just attended fascinating lecture from Prof Andy Stanford-Clark from IBM, he has a house that Twitters! http://bit.ly/8fS362 #mscidel
@Comcultgirl @claraoshea That sounds like a plan! We will use the considerable channels at our disposal to stay in touch with #mscidel
@Comcultgirl @gallagher_msean I also hear Twitter might be quite good for staying connected :P #mscidel
edinburghmsc: via @flittleton: Some coverage of the virtual graduation event from BBC, Student and Metro available at http://bit.ly/4znRMD #edslgrad
edinburghmsc: via @flittleton: Photos are finally up of virtual graduation!! http://bit.ly/4znRMD #edslgrad
an answer to the issues regarding thought in today's IDEL tutorial :) http://bit.ly/4IMJfE #mscidel